Normally it’s people who I’d say influenced me the most, but that’s possibly in aggregate. A truly enormous single influence has been Doctor Who, and I don’t truly grasp why — but it turns out I can pin down when that influencing me happened.

For I could only really call myself a Doctor Who fan from about August 1978 to somewhere around January 1984, and even working that out now I am surprised it was as long as it was. I sidled into the show in time for when it now seems Tom Baker had lost interest, and I faded away just before the end of Peter Davison’s era.

Yet that show is part of me. I did end up writing a few Big Finish editions of Doctor Who and that was special, that remains a rather towering highlight for me. But if the candle really burned for only a short time, I seem to have used that time and that candlelight learning about the show.

I do not believe, for instance, that there is a single Doctor Who story from 1963 to 1989 that I wouldn’t always have recognised by title or plot, certainly companion, and probably writer. I’m afraid it’s also a little impossible that I wouldn’t also have an opinion about any story you name: I hope that would be because because I’d seen it, but I’d more likely read the book, and I certainly knew what the general consensus of Doctor Who fans was.

But ’63 to ’89 is 26 years, or 159 stories, or precisely 700 episodes. And it was surprising to me how very many of those 700 I hadn’t seen, how many truly famous Doctor Who stories I had not watched.

Until now.

As of last night, I’ve seen them all. Or at least, all of the surviving ones, which works out to somewhere around 600 episodes. On 24 April 2022, I started watching the lot on Britbox, initially one episode per day, and apart from a month’s break while I was on holiday, the only thing that changed was that I moved to watching them on ITVX.

At first, I was rigid about that business watching one episode per day, but while I haven’t skipped any day other than over that holiday, during the Jon Pertwee years I started watching two or more in a row. I was feeling ill one evening, it was late at night, I was on my own, I watched two or three and having done so, that somehow freed me to keep doing it. I watched all of the final three-part story last night, for instance.

So as I say, I haven’t missed a day, and quite often I’d watch more than one edition. Sometimes that was because I was enjoying them, as you might hope, but sometimes it was also just to get them over with.

There are some low points.

Actually, I was surprised just how many low points there were. A couple of times I came within a pixel of giving up, I’d been through such a bad run, such a poor season, and it was only momentum plus knowing a famous one was coming, that kept me going.

Then of course there would be the good stories, the ones where you start to realise why you like this show but then forget that you’re even wondering that and are instead just into it all.

You do also have to factor in time, which I feel is ironic given what this show is about. Certainly the world and television drama has changed a lot since that first-ever episode in 1963, and certainly the show itself did not change along with it. Or at least it didn’t change to keep up very quickly, or at least not until the revival in 2005 where Doctor Who just burst out of the screen.

But even allowing for the Sixties, and the Seventies, and possibly most especially the Eighties, I don’t know why I like the show.

It’s been so important to me that I would like to know. The usual answer, if you ask a fan, is that because of its format, Doctor Who can do anything. It can go anywhere, it can go anywhen, it can be a farce or a thriller as it sees fit.

Except having watched it all now, I don’t think classic Doctor Who actually goes very far at all. So it can’t be the boundless possibilities because more than brilliant imagination being thwarted by inadequate budgets, the show didn’t seem to try bounding all that often.

Yet it has something. After watching Survival, part 3, by Rona Monro, last night, I went back to rewatch An Unearthly Child by Anthony Coburn, the very first story. I have now seen literally hundreds of episodes, yet that first sight of the police box, that first sight of the bigger insides, and that first sound of the TARDIS taking off, I think it was actually magical.

I’d like to understand but maybe I don’t have to and maybe I don’t have a choice. I do know that I feel I’ve accomplished something with this unbroken marathon viewing, but then I also know that’s a bit daft of me.

Let it be daft.

Let me not understand.

Whatever it is about Doctor Who that so got into me, it got so far into me and it has lasted so long that it has itself made me impervious to its worst moments. I have not one single clue how it did that, but for all its faults, for all its sometimes excruciating episodes, Doctor Who still owns me.

It was a small and flawed and cheap show, but it had an influence that was far bigger once you got into it.